Swiss Life Asset Managers in Germany recently bought a huge portfolio of healthcare properties for its new fund Swiss Life ESG Health Care Deutschland V S.C.S. in one of the largest transactions in recent years.
The portfolio, consisting of 27 properties across 11 of German’s state, was sold by independent funds manager Threestones Capital Management of Luxembourg, likewise focused on European healthcare strategies.
According to Swiss Life’s head of healthcare transactions Nikolai Schmidt, “The opportunity to acquire this portfolio came at exactly the right time, as we have just launched our new Swiss Life ESG Health Care V fund. It is a rare opportunity to acquire a large portfolio of high-quality health care properties in Germany, and a great start for the new fund.”
The ESG Health Care Deutschland V fund invests in the nursing home, assisted living and medical centre sectors, focusing on core and core+ properties, and continues Swiss Life’s 15-year involvement in healthcare funds for institutional clients. The fund is targeting a volume of €1bn and has already raised equity of €350m, with another €200m pending, said the company. By end-February it had already acquired €515m of assets. It has committed itself to full ESG transparency, along with further specific ecological and social criteria beyond formal ESC compliance. The fund is targeting a yield of 5%.
Swiss Life says this latest portfolio has a particularly advantageous geographic and operator diversification, with over 60% of its care facilities being operated by two of the three largest German operators in the care sector.
All the properties have a clear focus on full in-patient care. They are all of different ages and degrees of modernization, and hence different asset management requirements, said Swiss Life. Annual rental income amounts to about €18.4 million and is secured by the assets’ well-established operators. The average remaining term of all leases is around 16 years.
Separately, private equity investor Carlyle is said to be preparing a sale of its healthcare clinic chain Ameos, for a price reported to be up to €1.3bn.
Founded in 2002, Ameos is based in Zürich and operates a chain of 96 acute clinics and psychiatric hospitals across Germany, Austria and Switzerland, employing 15,700 staff. Carlyle bought a majority stake in the company ten years ago, in which private equity group Quadriga and original founder Axel Paeger are also shareholders. Carlyle is also a major shareholder in the Bavarian healthcare chain Schön-Klinik. Ameos most recently generated an EBITDA of about €110m
Carlyle is said to have mandated JP Morgan and Macquarie to organize the structured bidding process, which based on typical valuations of a multiple of annual profits in the sector, could value the business at €1.3bn. An alternative, should the price prove too ambitious, would be to pay itself a debt-financed special dividend, according to some observers. This might prove realistic, given the struggles of COVID-year 2020, when large numbers of beds were reserved for COVID patients and non-urgent operations were postponed, turnover was down and remains under pressure.
